Drop spreaders are manually pushed upon wheels along a surface, such as a ground, sidewalk, or roadway, and particulate material are dropped straight down through discharge openings in the bottom of a hopper of the spreader over a wide distance depending on the width of the hopper and discharge openings in the bottom thereof, so that the spreader only covers areas along the surface it crosses. A controller, sometimes called a bail controller, is positionable by the operator to open and close a flow gate below the hopper to start and stop dropping of particulate material through discharge openings of the hopper, so that the operator can control when particulate material are dropped while pushing the spreader along a surface.
Hoppers of conventional drop spreaders can be divided into two compartments with discharge openings along the bottom thereof, but have a single flow gate to open and close all of the discharge openings of the hopper. It has been found desirable to drop particulate material over less than the entire width of the spreader. However, despite having two compartments, the limitation of a single flow gate for the entire spreader makes it difficult to drop particulate material over only half the width of the spreader without placing particulate material in one compartment and not in the other.
Further, drop spreaders typically have rotatable particulate agitator elements, such as vanes, teeth, or horizontal augers, disposed upon a shaft that extends across the width of the hopper, even when the hopper in divided into left and right compartments. Such particulate agitator elements are used to improve flow of particulate elements from the hopper by breaking up clumps of particulate material. Conventional drop spreaders directly rotate such agitator elements using a drive shaft upon which the two wheels of the spreader are mounted. While useful, this requires that the two wheels of the spreader be disposed along the outside of the two opposing sides wall that define the width of the hopper so that the drive shaft for the wheels extends, via holes in such sides of the hopper, across entire width of the hopper. This increases the operational width needed for using the drop spreader beyond the width of the hopper to include the width of the wheels. If instead the wheels were positioned under the hopper of the spreader, then the drive shaft mounted to such wheels to directly rotate agitator elements cannot extend across the entire width dimension of the hopper. Thus it would be desirable to provide a drop spreader that can drop particulate material from the hopper's discharge openings substantially over the entire width dimension of the spreader that includes the width of the wheels, while providing wheel driven rotatable agitator elements that can extend to opposing side walls of the hopper. Moreover, direct drive by drive shaft wheels of the shaft along which agitator elements are mounted of conventionally drop spreaders often requires that the base of the hopper be lower to the ground, i.e., between the drive shaft and the surface over which the spreader travels, than often is desirable especially when needing to maneuver the hopper around snow banks in the case of dropping salt particulates.